What’s Up With Resolutions?

It’s that time of year! You know, where everyone is thinking back on all of the things they wish they had actually accomplished this year and they’re convincing themselves they’ll get it done next year. It’s time to set some New Year’s resolutions!

But what’s up with that? Why does it take people a whole year to reflect on what’s going right or wrong in their life and try to change their direction? Why does it take you a year to realize your diet and exercise regime is something you couldn’t stick to and you’re no better off than you were last year? Why were you still unmotivated in your career doing the same old thing? Why didn’t you get your head in the game for school? Why did you continue to pursue toxic relationships?

Continuous Improvement

Resolutions are all about trying to get better; we’re trying to continuously improve. Often when I talk to people about “agile” software development, all that I really try to drive at is that “continuous improvement”, in my own personal opinion, is really the important part.

So to continuously try to improve, you need to analyze what’s going well and what’s going not so well, set some goals, try things out, and re-evaluate. It’s a nice iterative cycle. It’s kind of like setting mini resolutions for yourself (or in the case of software development, maybe for your team or teams).

The big difference is the amount of time between measuring whether or not your change is having an effect! Waiting an entire year to try and measure your success would be absolute insanity in a fast moving software environment… why haven’t we gotten better at realizing this for our own personal continuous improvement?

Mark Manson

I’ve been reading a ton of Mark Manson material lately because of events going on in my life and the fact that the way he writes really aligns with how I often talk to my close friends. There’s analysis, there’s some humour, but it’s often a bit blunt and to the point. It’s actually a really nice change from many leadership, self help, or similar content where everything almost feels impossibly positive. This just feels like a real person talking to you.

Mark talks about setting goals in this blog post, and it got me motivated to reflect on my own goals and even write this post. In Mark’s post, he talks about our identities being built up by a bunch of habits, and goes on to state that some research shows that often habits only take about 30 days to form. In his opinion, using a whole year to set a goal of changing, adding, or dropping a habit just allows us to procrastinate for the entire year and then ultimately we fail.

His suggestion? Shorten the time frame.

If it takes on average 30 days to make a habit, why not have a “New Month’s Resolution”? Setting resolutions this way should then allow you to establish a new habit and then at the end of the month reflect on whether or not it worked well. You have less time to procrastinate. Your iteration is much shorter. Interesting.

My Own Goals

I figured I’d wrap this up by sharing some of my own goals publicly. I have a few things I’d like to work on coming up for the year, so I’ll outline them briefly:

Read more:

I’ve definitely dropped the ball on this one. I always had the excuse for myself that I don’t have time to do it. However, I found when I read the most consistently was when I found a decent book that I could read for a few minutes before I fell asleep every night. No pressure to get through it, but the books were there if I felt intrigued or needed to relax my brain a bit.

Try meditation:

I’ve always associated meditation with being spiritual or religious. Both of these things don’t really mesh well with me, personally. Mark Manson mentioned meditation in his post that I mentioned earlier, and it gave me a different perspective. I know I get stressed easily and I used to have pretty bad anxiety problems. Maybe this is something I could try out?

Write more:

I used to blog a lot. Between this blog, my fitness blog, and my car blog, I used to write content multiple times per week. It was always a bit of a social media experiment to get a better feel for how internet traffic works and where different types of content get the best visibility, but it also let me express myself. My content production has been almost nothing over the past year, and it’s something I’d like to look at more of.

Try public speaking:

This was something my HR Director had a chat with me about as a potentially cool opportunity. We were discussing getting more involved with the community and pushing boundaries, and she proposed speaking to students at local colleges or similar. I was turned off by it at first because I don’t like public speaking. But then the more I thought about it, I don’t know what public speaking is because I’ve never really done it. So why not try it?

But those aren’t my resolutions! Those are all just ideas for things I’m interested in improving. So taking some of Manson’s advice, I’m going to take ONE of those things and try to form a habit out of it for a month. Focusing on one thing at a time allows you to really give yourself an opportunity to establish the habit without worrying about too many other things, and ultimately setting yourself up for failure.

My first resolution is going to be to try out meditation. So for the first month, I’m going to try meditating four times per week for about 10 minutes at a time. I should be able to easily do this for two days on Saturday and Sunday where I don’t really have any external commitments, and then during the week I should be able to find at least two days before work where I can give this a shot.

Identifying when you need to refocus

It happens to everyone at some point to varying degrees, for various reasons, and at different times in our lives–but it’ll happen! You hit a period or a rut where you can’t keep your focus on continuing to be successful (and I’m over-generalizing that for a good reason).

Maybe this means you can’t focus at work to perform at an optimal level. Maybe you’re falling off the diet you’ve been working hard on. Maybe your training in the gym or for your sport is taking a hit because your head isn’t in the game. Maybe you find yourself unable to hit the books studying or completing your projects in school.

It can look different for everyone.

There are a bunch of different little warning signs that things aren’t quite on track and you need to refocus:

You’re losing interest in what you’re working on or have been working towards

You can’t seem to keep your mind on the goal(s) that you’ve set

You feel like you’re plateauing in your progress toward your goal(s)

You’re suddenly finding you’re not happy or not feeling fulfilled

You’re taking out stress on your co-workers, friends, or loved ones

You’re isolating yourself from friends and family

You find yourself overly concerned with things you can’t change (dwelling on the past or fearing a future event, like an exam)

But don’t freak out just yet… you need to see and acknowledge the signs before you can start to make any progress. Feeling pretty good about everything in your life? Then keep doin’ what you’re doin’! If any of those points seemed to resonate with you, then let’s continue on!

Don’t worry

If you’ve found that you’re in a bit of a rut, it’s important to not worry. You need to remind yourself that you were once on track and you’ll get back on track. You’ve already identified you need to refocus, so you have the power to get back on track.

Worrying about the fact you’ve identified you’re not in an ideal state of mind doesn’t help anything; in fact, it makes it worse.

“I can’t seem to find my focus at work… I’m going to be such a bad employee. I wonder if I can even get my work done now. My colleagues are going to notice… My manager will notice!”

“Training has really been kicking my butt… Why am I even doing this? I wonder if I should just give up. I haven’t seen any progress in my abilities in the past couple of weeks. I’m hopeless at this.”

“There’s a lot going on at school now and I can’t seem to keep up anymore. I’m going to fail this project that’s due next week because I can’t seem to get started on it. And my exams are coming up and I can’t seem to study. I’m going to fail this term.”

All of that kind of talk is negative and it’s not going to help you progress! So why are you continuing to focus on hampering your progress? Don’t do it. Instead, acknowledge you’re looking for a positive change, and then acknowledge that you’re in full control to start making that change.

And step one is to stop worrying and drop the negativity.

Analyze what’s getting you down

I get told that the engineer in me talks too much about analysis… but I think it’s a critical step! You need to understand the things that are getting you down. You’ve identified that you need to refocus because you’re not happy with your current behaviour or state of mind, but what are those things that are getting you down?

If you understand what’s getting you down you can start to take corrective actions. It’s got a (cue the fancy buzzword) synergistic effect with my previous point–Drop the negative thoughts and work on correcting them in parallel.

Let’s look at a couple of potential examples:

You’re unable to see any progress in your work, schooling, or training

How are you measuring progress right now?

Some things aren’t well suited for quantitative measurement

Try and identify a consistent mechanism for measuring progress

How often do you measure progress?

Some things don’t change very frequently so it’s hard to notice progress

Many things don’t progress in a totally linear fashion

Is it time to update your strategy for continuing success?

How long have you been doing the exact same thing expecting to get the same increase in results?

Have other environmental factors changed that suggest you should update what you’re doing?

Have you actually compared your current status to a previous point in time, or is it just how you feel?

Maybe it’s all in your head!

Try reflecting on where you were a month ago, 6 months ago, and a year ago.

You’re constantly comparing yourself to others

Do you actually know all the ins and outs of a person’s life?

Just because you observe certain things, it doesn’t mean they’re exactly as they seem

If you don’t have the full perspective and details on someone’s life, you’re guaranteed to be misunderstanding something

Can you change other people?

… Even if you could, you shouldn’t!

See the next major point 🙂

Are you comparing different subsets of your lives and expecting them to align a certain way?

Other people are not you and are living a different life

You can only truly compare yourself to your own self at various parts in your life

You’re dwelling on things you can’t change

Are you expecting to change something in the past that’s already happened?

Unless you have a time machine, you absolutely cannot change past events

Trying to understand past events can be helpful learning for the future

Are you dreading an event in the future that’s unavoidable?

If you can’t avoid it, then work at accepting it’s going to happen. (Things like exams or year-end reviews for work, for example)

You can’t (and shouldn’t try to) control how other people think and feel

The best you can do is focus on yourself and live the values that you believe in

When it comes to thoughts and feelings, we all observe and interpret on our own

Have you considered whether this situation is temporary?

When you don’t know how long you’ll be out of control, it can make you feel helpless

Knowing there’s a point in time where there’s a change that can affect your situation can be a great help (i.e. money is tight for two weeks and you just need that next pay cheque to come through)

These are just a handful of examples, but hopefully you can see a pattern:

Identify a particular thing that you know is getting you down.

Ask yourself what effects it’s having and why you believe it’s having those effects on you.

Dive deeper on each one of those by repeating these steps.

It’s nothing groundbreaking and I’m not claiming it will magically fix your problems… But analyzing things can lead to understanding, and understanding can lead to progress.

Remind yourself of your strengths

Everyone gets down on themselves at some point and this will cause you to lose focus on your goals. But I guarantee you if you stop and think about it, there’s a lot of great things that you got going on!

Don’t believe me? I challenge you to take a pen and something you can write on.

Write three things you’re proud of or that you’ve accomplished

Write three things about why your best friends like you

Write down the thing you love doing most or loved doing most before this point in time

Write down the thing you think you’re best at

Now step back for a second and think about the things you wrote.

It’s very likely the accomplishments you made or things you’re proud of required you to overcome something. Unless you got lucky or had some magic, odds are you used your strengths to achieve these things.

Your friends stay by your side because they admire you. They admire the qualities you have and see strength in you. You might not realize these strengths, but your friends perceive these about you.

If you love doing something, you’re probably pretty good at it, and if you’re not, odds are you’ll get good at it because you love to do it! Acknowledge and understand what you’re passionate about because it will tell you about your strengths.

Sometimes you’re good at things that you’re not totally passionate about. That’s cool too! What makes you good at this thing? Can you apply this to other areas in your life?

Set some goals

At this point you’ve:

Identified that you’re not content with your current state

Reminded yourself that you can make a change

Analyzed what’s getting you down so that you have a better understanding of some direction to take

Reflected on your own personal strengths

And now… It’s time to set some goals!

Goals you set should ideally align with SMART goals. Do yourself a favour and check that page out for a little bit more information so you can set yourself up for success. You want to make sure you’ve agreed your goal is achievable within a certain period of time and that you can measure progress in some way as you go. This is critical for a few reasons:

No time box? How will you know if you’re on track?

No way to measure? … Same problem!

Not realistic or achievable? You’re setting yourself up for failure.

It seems obvious when it’s laid out like that, but this will keep you from setting goals like “I’m going to do better at work”, “I’ll kick my training up a notch”, or “I’ll worry less about what’s going on in other peoples’ lives”. None of those goal statements indicate when you’ll be done by or how you’re going to measure progress.

Here’s a simple example:

In the next month, instead of missing on average three practices per week, I’ll reduce this to one. I’ll make sure that I have things put into my agenda ahead of time so I won’t schedule things over practice sessions, and if something critical comes up last minute, I can use the following week to compensate for it.

Specifically about not missing practices

Measured weekly by an average of missed practices

Achievable because it’s an improvement and not an expectation of perfection

Realistic and with the reward of getting to more practices

Time boxed to one month.

Start slow and set one or two SMART goals. As you build confidence that you’re progressing in your goals, try adding in another. You don’t want to overwhelm yourself!

Be brave enough to ask for help

If you’re reading this and you’re considering making changes then you’re already starting your path to progress. That’s AWESOME and you’re a strong person for being able to get started.

Sometimes things can get tough though. You might feel you’ve made progress over a few weeks or months and seemingly fall back to square one. You might feel like you’ve set SMART goals but you’re having trouble even getting started. Maybe you read this and still don’t even know how to get started.

There are a million reasons why getting started or continuing can be hard. Be brave though. Ask for help. I can guarantee you have some amazing friends and family that love you that want to see you be successful. There’s nothing to be ashamed of when asking for help! It’s a courageous thing to admit that you’d like assistance on your path for doing better, and people see that. You might feel embarrassed or ashamed, but other people see a brave person trying to move forward.

Summary

It’s a common thing for people to fall into a figurative rut in life. It happens to everyone at some point and it’s nothing to get down on yourself about. You’re not a bad human being if it happens to you, so don’t sweat it.

Analyzing your current situation and why you feel certain ways can help you gain an understanding of what’s going on. Focus on driving out the negativity and create actions to try making progress by leveraging your strengths.

In the end, remember that you control your life and you can make all the positive changes to it that you want to see. It takes time and hard work, but if you put in the effort, you’ll always get to where you want to be.

Trying To Keep It Alllll Together…

I’m a big fan of TODO lists. I find that they’re a great way for me to set up a bunch of tasks and feel really productive as I work through them. I’ll make TODO lists for almost anything. What do I need to get done tomorrow morning at work? What groceries do I need to get? What topics am I thinking of blogging about? I’ll get some sort of TODO list going for anything.

The one thing that I need in my TODO list to stay effective is to constantly have it around me to remind me. I was running the Evernote app on my Android phone and recently made the observation that things that I put in there had a much higher likelihood of getting done versus things I put in my work notebook. The reason? I check my phone a lot more than my work notebook. I have my phone with me when I grocery shop. I have it before and after I workout at the gym. It’s my alarm in the morning so I have access to it as soon as I wake up. My work notebook? Not so much.

The problem here is that my important work tasks I want to accomplish were not getting the same treatment my out-of-work tasks were getting. They weren’t getting the same success rate.

Enter Google Keep

I try to meet up with my teammates once a month to discuss their goals or things we need to work through at the office. In my last round of one-on-ones, I was discussing my TODO lists with one of my colleagues, Samantha. She said that she noticed I was using Evernote, but was curious of I’ve ever tried out Google Keep. I admitted that I hadn’t, but she was speaking highly of it. “Why not give it a shot?” I thought. But it hacked my TODO list concept in a big way.

Google Keep has one feature that I think is totally awesome on my phone. I never tried this with Evernote, so I’m not claiming that it can’t do this. The phone widget is truly awesome. Right on my homescreen of my phone, I can see my TODO lists. This takes that first point I was discussing (need to have access to it all the time) to a whole new level. Now instead of having to go to the app itself to get refreshed on what I need to do, almost any time I touch my phone I’m having visibility into my TODO lists.

A second powerful feature is the idea of checkboxes for progress. This probably sounds like it’s not all that important. “Google Keep has checkboxes? Great… I have bullet points in any other app I can get my hands on!” I can hear you saying that now 😉 But it’s different. I was using Evernote and keeping bulleted lists, and when I was through with something, I’d just delete the whole bullet point. The idea of checking things off your list is powerful because it shows you that your making progress. I can see that I have only 3 of 10 items left on my list and that gives me a bit more drive to try and knock off the rest. If my list is always just a view of what’s left, it will always feel like it’s never done.

Summary

I’m not trying to push Google Keep or bash Evernote here… I’m just trying to show you how a few simple hacks in my TODO lists were able to provide some real positive benefits. For me, the things I need in my TODO list technology are:

Easy to access

Ability to access frequently

Insight into progress I’m making on the list

… Not cost me a cent!

Your list might look a bit different. You could argue that you don’t always want the list in front of you or that you don’t want total transparency into the progress you’re making. I can’t speak for you in terms of what will be most effective, but I highly recommend Google Keep after using it for only a couple of weeks.

Now my only problem is that I look like I’m ignoring people if I’m taking notes on my phone in a meeting! Thanks for the suggestion, Sam!

PROFIT HOT 50

It’s with great honour that I can say the company I’m part of, Magnet Forensics, has achieved the 7th place in the Profit Hot 50 rankings for 2013. Last year Magnet Forensics was also on the list ranked at number 16th, but we’ve shown ourselves up by moving a full 9 positions! Our ranking in the Profit Hot 50 is even more impressive considering we’re the only company from Kitchener-Waterloo region in Ontario–Known for it’s incredible startup community and success stories–that made the list. We’re excited and tremendously proud of our accomplishments, but it’s certainly going to be quite the challenge for us to move up in rank next year. It’s a challenge we’re all ready to take on though. You can check out the ranking over here or at the official Profit Guide posting.

Articles

I’ll put the horn-tooting aside… even though it’s an incredible accomplishment (not sure that I mentioned that already).

Don’t Be A Perfectionist: Ilya Pozin discusses the downsides to being a perfectionist. Often, people call themselves perfectionists when they can’t think of some other weakness they might have (you see it a lot in interviews) and because they think it’s a loop-hole in the question. I mean, if your weakness is that you’re perfect… how can that be a weakness, right?! Well in reality, aside form being a cheesy way to answer an otherwise good interview question, perfectionism can certainly be a problem. Especially in a fast-paced startup environment, we’re often not hunting for perfect. We’re hunting for 80% perfect with 20% of the effort. It’s the only way we can keep moving fast and get products or services to our customers. Besides, we don’t know what “perfect” actually is… Our customers do. And if we never get anything to them, how the heck can we ever know what perfect is?

How Goofing Off Can Make You More Successful: In this article, Adam Rifkin discusses over work. It’s a great tie in to the articles I shared last week about burnout. Adam talks about why we often find ourselves in situations where we feel like we’re forced to over work to be successful and shared a handful of suggestions for how to avoid it. His top 3: Doing nothing. Socializing. Helping others. Sound counter-intuitive to your poor overworked soul? Well kick back, relax, and have a good read through his post 🙂

The New Rules for Career Success: In Dave Kerpen‘s article, he shares some answers from Dan Schawbel about what it means to have a successful career. Among the top points, Dan suggests looking inside your current company before looking for opportunities elsewhere. This is a a key point because instead of becoming a chronic company hopper you can actually look for other great opportunities in the company you’ve already invested yourself in. Additionally, Dan suggests acting like an entrepreneur at your current job. If you’ve already proven yourself successful at your role, look for side projects that can benefit your company.

The Part They Don’t Tell You About Startup Team Building: The end result of becoming a good leader is often that you obsolete yourself in your current job. It’s a strange truth about the position: You start off taking on a large workload and then lead others so that they can effectively take on your portion and more. Where does that put you as a leader though? Tomasz Tunguz discusses this leadership role evolution in his article.

Raspberry Pi + WordPress => PiPress: This is a bit of a shameless plug, but I thought it might be cool for any tech-savvy bloggers out there who are looking for a bit of a DIY. After reading all over The Internet for how I can use my Raspberry Pi, I discovered I could use it to host a blog. So, for what it’s worth, the text you’re reading right now is coming from a little computer just a tad bigger than a credit card.

Adventures in Cat (and Dog) Sitting: What I Learned about Managing People: If you don’t know what your pets have in common with your employees, Whitney Johnson can help you out with that. Why is this comparison necessary? Well if you think about how some people treat their pets (letting them out for walks, feeding them when they need it, belly rubs, petting, etc…) there are a lot of parallels with your employees… Well, there should be. Your employees deserve a good environment to work in, being acknowledged for their hard work, and having engaging work.

That’s it for this week! I hope you checked out the Profit Hot 50 article I mentioned above. Follow Dev Leader on popular social media outlets to get these updates through the week!

Burnout

The trend in the articles this week is all about burnout. Burnout is a serious issue that can affect a wide variety of people. When an individual becomes so dedicated to something and starts devoting all of their time to accomplish a goal, burnout can set in. This is especially noticeable in startup companies where it’s typical to work longer-than normal hours. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with loving the work you do and wanting to put in more time! The problem ends up being when all of your waking time is geared toward one thing and everything else (including sleep!) starts to take the back seat. This is where burnout can set in.

Articles

The Six Deadly Sins of Leadership: Leadership isn’t always easy, but there’s definitely a few things you should avoid doing as a leader. Jack Welch and his wife Suzy do an excellent job of describing six things you should not do. Ignoring values for the sake of results and forgetting to have fun along the way are two of my favourite points.

11 Simple Concepts to Become a Better Leader: Having lists makes for having good references, and Dave Kerpen certainly has a great list for leadership tips. Number one on his list is of course listening. It’s that thing that every good leader should be doing more of. Being a team player, being passionate, and being adaptive are also up there on the list.

3 Key Reasons to be Optimistic Like Steve Case: Julia Boorstin touches on an excellent point in her article: by remaining optimistic, you can view all of your challenges as opportunities to get better. Leaders need to learn from their mistakes (and we all make them) but those challenges are really just self-improvement opportunities.

Avoiding Burnout: Take it from an entrepreneur, burnout is serious business. Andrew Dumont talks about his experiences as an entrepreneur and how burnout set in. The best part of Andrew’s post is that in the end he gives a great list of tips for how you can help avoid burnout in your own work/life. Highly recommended read!

How to Prevent Employee Burnout: KISSmetrics has a huge list of tips for how you can help keep employees from running into burnout problems. They start off by defining what burnout is and how you can detect it among your employees. By knowing what causes burnout, it’s a lot easier to try and address solutions for it.

It’s Time to Dream for a Living: Whitney Johnson talks about how being a dreamer lets you achieve a psychological pay-off similar to a well designed game. Be social, go above and beyond by tackling things that aren’t always necessary, and immerse yourself in epic scale.

6 Ways to Put the ‘Good’ in Goodbye: Read this article by Chester Elton that gives an awesome example of how you should treat departures of good employees from your company. When a good employee leaves your company, it’s probably for a good reason. Try to celebrate their work and encourage success for them when they’re leaving. There’s not much worse than trying to spin things around and make a potentially great opportunity for them a poisonous experience.

Burnout: The Disease of Our Civilization: Arianna Huffington put’s it elegantly that most of us have “the misguided belief that overwork is the route to high performance and great results”. It’s exactly why many people fall into the doom that is burnout. It’s a longer read than some of the articles I’ve shared, but I do recommend it!

Find Leadership Inspiration in Your Everyday Encounters: You don’t need to look much further than ever-day life to be able to pick up on some great examples of inspiration for leadership. Simply work on rule #1: Listen. John Ryan (and I don’t know if it’s just me, but I can’t stop thinking of Wedding Crashers when I read his name) details his experience on a plane and how he was able to draw inspiration from one of the passengers he was sitting with. Always try to learn something from the situations you find yourself in–It’s an excellent way to develop yourself.

Want to Save Your Life?: “Rest is not a luxury. It’s part of survival” are some powerful words from Erica Fox. She discusses what the effects of overwork are on our mind and body and in the end offers up lots of great examples for how you can avoid burnout. Another solid read.

Hope you enjoyed! It’s great to be driven to accomplish your goals, but don’t become so narrow sighted that you lose track of the rest of the things that matter. Remember to follow on popular social media outlets to get these updates through the week!

Here’s the collection of articles I’ve shared on social media outlets over the past week:

Why Innovation Is So Hard: A few good points on why innovating sometimes feels like it’s a difficult thing to do and what you can do to improve!

Present Slides, Distribute Documents: Do your meetings sometimes feel like someone is just reading you a slide show? You can read a slide show yourself, can’t you? Why not distribute the slide show ahead of time?!

Look Out! When the Visible Becomes Invisible: Invisible work “clutter” can be holding your efficiency back at work. Check out this article for why ignoring things at work and letting them build up can get dangerous… and of course, how to avoid it 🙂

Having a Really Lousy Day? Some Ways to Feel Better: We all have bad days. This article has some great practical tips (13 of them!) for you to improve your day. My favourite is number 2: do something nice for someone else. Definitely a great way to make your day better.

Are You a Workaholic or an Outlier?: This article discusses what being a workaholic means and the differences between when it may be a good thing versus a bad thing. The real takeaway point is to remember to do what you love.

29 Reasons to Start a Bog Today: Ever considered starting a blog? For me, it kind of happened over night… but I’m betting there are lots of people at least on the fence about it. Why not give it a shot? Check out this article and you might get that little nudge you need to take the plunge!

5 Ways To Lead No Matter Your Title: Some of the best leaders at a company are home-grown and not brought in from somewhere else just because they were good leaders. In this article, Angie Hicks talks about 5 different ways you can put leadership skills into play even if you don’t have “Leader” in your job title.

So You Want To Pick Someone’s Brain? Do It Right: Sometimes I think this kind of stuff is common sense, but I’m definitely being proven wrong on this one! In this article, Linda Coles talks about a handful of things to consider when reaching out to someone to ask them for their opinion on something. Think about it… Why would you do it differently than if you had the opportunity to do it in person?!

Be SMARTe: How to Clarify Confusion: This article focuses on hiring and resumes, but I think the concept applies in the more general sense. Lou Adler puts it well right at the beginning, “if you can’t describe exactly what you want, don’t be surprised if you don’t get it”. Using a simple set of guidelines, you can formulate what you’re looking for in a clear and concise manner that helps reduce assumptions and confusion.

To Become An Expert, Do This One Thing: In this article, Whitney Johnson makes a great point: you need to leave your ego at the door if you want to build up your skill set in an area where you’re a beginner. Just because you might be accomplished at some things, you need to get into the beginner mindset.

Are You Grounded in Trust?: Stan McChrystal writes about a parallel to trust in your business and team. Trust is incredibly important, especially in small businesses, because it let’s people focus on what they are experts at. In order to keep your team operating efficiently, everyone should feel like they can trust the other team members.

How to Focus Innovation: This article identifies the 6 ‘W’s that you need to answer when considering innovation. Gijs van Wulfen describes these steps as the necessary formula for innovation. He then outlines a group of questions that you should ask about your innovation in terms of it’s placement in the market. Certainly a lot of things to consider, but they all seem worthwhile.

The Joys Of Screwing Up: Being fearless is neccessary for innovation according to Jeff DeGraff. When we become afraid of taking risks and pushing the boundaries, innovation stagnates. How can you innovate if you’re never willing to take risks?

7 Tips for Surviving Life As a Middle Manager: Nothing I would consider ground breaking here, but Dennis Berman has done an awesome job of summarizing a lot of excellent middle management tips. You may have read about some of these in some of the articles I’ve shared, but it’s certainly a great list to refer to!

Hope you enjoyed! Remember to follow on popular social media outlets to get these updates through the week!

I work as a team lead of software engineering at Magnet Forensics (http://www.magnetforensics.com). I'm into powerlifting, bodybuilding, and blogging about leadership/development topics over at http://www.devleader.ca.